OK, I know I talk about R too much, but I like R, so I’m going to talk about it some more. Common situation: repeat a procedure many times; each time generates some large wadge of awful-structured data, and in … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I have to admit that working with my Major League Soccer data set has been slow going.  There are a few reasons:  (1) I have a full-time job at the National Renewable Energy Lab and (2) the data isn’t quite … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I have posted a couple examples in the past on the topic of high quality map production from GRASS GIS-- usually via the Generic Mapping Tools. I am not sure why, but I have previously avoided using the traditional cartographic output module that is bu... [Read more...]

Over at the Mozilla Metrics blog, Mozillan Hamilton Ulmer uses R and ggplot2 to look at when people (or at least, Firefox users that volunteered to share their usage data) enable private browsing. Turns out it isn't just "porn mode" after all: the main use turns out to be lunchtime ... [Read more...]

In this post I publish a PDF document titled “A collection of tips for R in Finance”. It is a basic 5 page introduction to R in finances by Arnaud Amsellem (linked in profile). The article offers tips related to the following points: Code Editor Organizing R code Update packages Getting ... [Read more...]

In a two-part series at the Los Angeles R User Group[*], Ryan Rosario took a look at the many ways you can take the R language to the limits of high-performance computing. In Part I (see video at this link; slides and code also available), Ryan focuses on the various ... [Read more...]

WARNING: This has nothing to do with national security, but is nonetheless awesome. This evening I will be participating in that great annual tradition which marks the transition from Summer to Fall: the fantasy football draft. A large part of having a successful fantasy football draft is being able to ... [Read more...]

GSoC 2010 is over – here’s the harvest from my project: TripleR 0.4.3 is the current stable version – and it is a major milestone in its development. Now for the first time social relations round robin designs can be analyzed in R. All results have been cross-checked with TripleR’s DOS predecessor ... [Read more...]

The development version of R is stored in a Subversion repository at the URL http://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/. In fact, you can browse the source code by clicking the link. Subversion Hierarchy Subversion is software for source code revision control. That means it keeps track of changes, who ... [Read more...]

A recent question over at BioStar asked whether abstracts returned from a PubMed search could easily be visualised as “word clouds”, using Wordle. This got me thinking about ways to solve the problem using R. Here’s my first attempt, which demonstrates some functions from the RCurl and XML packages. ... [Read more...]

A few weeks ago, a paper on which I am a co-author was accepted for publication in the french ecological journal Life & Environment. In this paper, we evaluate the consequences of recreative harvesting on three populations of sea urchins (…)Read the rest of this entry » [Read more...]

Tom Taverner introduced me to Benford’s Law as we were eating lunch together at a statistical computing conference: If you look at the first digits of data in many naturally-occuring datasets, a startling 30 percent of them are ones. “Pah!” I said. “That belies intuition! Why would one digit occur ... [Read more...]

A quick reminder that the IEEE traffic-prediction competition closes soon. If you're thinking of entering you'll need to get the description of your R-based solution in by September 13. IEEE ICDM Contest: Road Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation [Read more...]

Update: fixed projection. There are a bunch of “hockey sticks” that calculate past global temps. through the use of proxies when instrumental data is absent. There is a new one out there by McShane and Wyner (2010) that’s creating quite a stir in the blogosphere (here, here, here, here). The ... [Read more...]

Should you need datasets that come with R and additional packages (you can access them via data()) in one single file, here’s what I did to dump the entire workspace into one file: This code can easily be adapted to dump individual dataset into its own file. [Read more...]

...a continuing journey through Using R for Introductory Statistics, by John Verzani. Simple linear regression Linear regression is a kooky term for fitting a line to some data. This odd bit of terminology can be blamed on Sir Francis Galton, a proli... [Read more...]

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I’m updating a swing dotplot PDF every 10 minutes as the count progresses (and the cool part is that the updates continue even as I’m flying Heathrow to SFO). [Read more...]

I have a few posts nearing completion, but meanwhile a weekend break for art. Big thanks to Simon Urbanek and Jeffrey Horner, creators of Cairo, a library for the programming language R. Have you noticed how R can’t anti-alias (fancy way for saying smooth out lines and curves when ... [Read more...]